Long-time readers (all three of you) know that I have a great deal of respect for Fred Stutzman’s Unit Structures blog when it comes to all things social networking.  His roundup on the Microsoft-Facebook deal is even better than the one I would write if I had the time.

With respect to the 15 billion dollar valuation, I know alot of people feel it’s ridiculous, but as I’ve discussed before, if you look at the potential value of the data Facebook has, relatively small changes in their estimated probability of success add up to many billions of dollars.

The problem right now is that the confidence interval around that probability estimate is pretty wide, and Facebook’s challenge in the next year is to start tightening it up.  I think it’s safe to say that Facebook’s monetization strategies have been quite conservative thus far– their primary focus has been on building up the user base as much as possible and keeping those users happy.  The money they received from Microsoft and a couple of hedge funds gives them opportunity to build out the world’s best data mining operation, and even more importantly, it gives them the time and the freedom to experiment with different ways of using that information to create value.

Sergey was a little snippy about Facebook the other day, indicating that he felt like Google was better off because of the discipline that was required when they were building a company during the bust.  But it sounded to me like there was a tinge of jealousy in that statement (not to mention a general annoyance with Facebook for stealing many of Google’s engineers)– after all, I’m pretty sure Sergey would have taken 750 million dollars for 5% of Google back in 2001.

Labels: tech, social networks

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I didn’t wake up yesterday and say to myself, “I’m going to buy an iPhone.”

After all, I am a mature, responsible adult with a modicum of self-control. I happened to be running some errands that took me over towards the North Austin Apple Store, and I figured that as long as I was in the neighborhood, I might as well swing by and check one out. I started playing with the web, doing my reference google search, and then moved on to the (stupendously badass) Maps application.

After I plotted driving directions from my house in Austin to Palo Alto, CA, things started to get a little hazy. My fingers got all tingly and my mouth felt dry. I’m generally a pretty rational, scientific guy, but in that moment, I felt a presence all around me. It was the disembodied spirit of Steven P. Jobs, and he was telling me that I had to have an iPhone, and I had to have one now.

At least, that’s what I assume happened, because it’s the only thing that seems to explain what happened next. I hopped into my car for a 95 MPH jaunt down Mopac to the South Austin Apple Store, and before I really knew what was going on, I had my very own 8GB iPhone (the North Austin store only had the 4GB model, and I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to spend as much money on an iPhone as possible.)

After I got home and activated it (it took two seconds to activate, since I already had an AT&T account), I did the most natural thing I could think of- I started making obnoxious phone calls to my friends asking them if receiving a call from me on my iPhone was as cool for them as it was for me. (Invariably, it was.)

There have already been innumerable iPhone reviews that follow a general pattern: the author spends 1-2 sentences saying that the iPhone is completely amazing, and then devotes 4-5 paragraphs to whatever pet peeves they have with the phone.  (Most popular is the slowness of the EDGE network, but the stuff w/the non-replacable battery may have more staying power, and the weird headphone jack thing is just, well, weird.)

My feelings about the iPhone probably sync up best with John Gruber’s, who has done my favorite first-impressions post by far, especially since it seems like he explores the built-in apps (especially Calendar) far more than most of the professional journalists do.

Arguably, the dumbest objection I’ve read so far is the one about the slow EDGE network.  I’m betting it will take all of a week for webapps to launch that begin to compensate for the slow network by adapting content into a format that is optimized for viewing on the iPhone.  The key to all of this, as I see it, is RSS– the Safari browser in iPhone has a built in RSS reader that is automatically launched when you browse to a feed’s URL.  It’s an ideal way to read content on the EDGE network because the data you download is focused primarily on the text of the story (little superfluous javascript or ads) and the Safari RSS reader lets you navigate through the stories quickly and easily.

A clever startup (or, more likely, Google) should launch a webapp that lets you aggregate a number of RSS feeds into a single feed that can be accessed from your iPhone.  Then as you browse through the headlines, said startup would include a link that would allow you to save or share the story in order to read it later on a laptop, or when you were connected via WiFi.  The point here is that we can’t change the bandwidth of the EDGE network nearly as quickly as we can create applications to adjust to its constraints, and that’s the true power of having a real web browser built-in to the iPhone: all of the standard HTML/Javascript tricks and tools are available to anyone who wants to develop applications– no need to learn WAP or whatever else.  Of course, you still have the benefit of being able to load a standard webpage whenever you need it– but I seriously doubt that this will become the standard way to interface with the web on iPhone.  RSS is the way to go.

I think my favorite post about the iPhone so far is this one at Bubblegeneration, about the strategic implications of the iPhone for the mobile device industry, and how similar the strategy is to the one that Apple successfully (if perhaps inadvertently) applied to the music industry with the iPod.  Although most of the focus in the web industry right now is on platforms for rich internet applications, I think there is a very real and very interesting opportunity for companies to develop low-bandwidth, RSS-oriented applications for use with the iPhone.

Labels: tech, iphone

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Google announced a new plugin called Google Gears that allows web applications to provide functionality even when users are offline.  Right now, the only application that is using the new plugin is my beloved Google Reader, so I downloaded the plugin and decided to try it out.

Most of you who know me well are well-aware of what a Google whore I am, so this is hard for me to say– Google Gears sucks, and it sucks hard.

So there I am, flying through my feeds at my usual clip, when a pop-up informs me that I’m no longer connected to the Internet and asks if I would like to work in the offline mode.  I switch over to a different tab, type in www.yahoo.com, and it comes up immediately, so I’m thinking that Google Gears is mistaken.  I switch back to the Reader tab, close the pop-up, and I continue reading without a hitch.

And then the pop-up happens again.  And again.  And again.  And so I disabled Google Gears, and I’m iffy on ever re-enabling it.  I dig the idea of being able to read my feeds offline, but not at the expense of my user experience when I’m reading them online.  Notifying the user that the app thinks your offline is the sort of thing that should be handled by a status icon in the upper right hand corner right up until the point that the app can no longer satisfy the user’s request– the way that true desktop apps like Outlook handle it.

Blergh.  Very disappointing.

Labels: tech, web2.0

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there’s no way scoble’s second mix07 prediction is serious, right?

the idea is that you’re going to take something that’s slow and put it on top of something else that’s slow and somehow that will magically make twitter scale?

Labels: tech, web2.0

[ 0 comments ]